The Sheer Number of Guns in America Will Kill Us With or Without Terrorists

esquire.com – WASHINGTON, D.C.—It was Tuesday, so the U.S. senators from both parties were having their weekly policy lunches. This was in the wake of that body’s shameless capitulation on the issue of guns on Monday evening. The reaction around the country to that ungainly dive has not been a friendly one. So, on Tuesday, the halls of the world’s greatest deliberative body were redolent with the smell of fried fish and compromise.

Susan Collins and Heidi Heitkamp, Republican and Democratic senators respectively, and two women of virtually no influence within their respective caucuses, cobbled together a bill that they announced at a press conference in the early afternoon. The press conference was attended by an odd-lot of co-sponsors whom Collins and Heitkamp also cobbled together. These included Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, who probably just wants to get anything passed at this point, and Kelly Ayotte, Republican of New Hampshire, who is facing a tough re-election campaign back home and is using this issue to cast herself in a series of reaching-across-the-aisle/I’m-No-Politician campaign commercials down the road.